


The Long Way Around

by jmtorres



Series: 1941. Jack'n'Tosh. [2]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: AU, Gen, Stealth Crossover, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-24
Updated: 2007-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:10:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmtorres/pseuds/jmtorres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack and Tosh don't come back from 1941. Based on Unovis's prompt "Tosh, lost something."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Way Around

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



Nothing would ever quite make up for their being stranded; nothing could, Tosh thought, ever fully repay the loss of years, the isolation, and (Tosh regretted with shallowness that horrified her, until Jack confessed to the same) the lack of computers--but one thing came close.

It was some dozen years after they had gotten stuck in the war, and Jack had found them a branch of Torchwood where they wouldn't run into any other versions of him (that there was one, Tosh had guessed, putting the pieces together about Estelle and Jack's "father"; that there were others surprised her). Torchwood folded them in, kept them working too hard to interfere with their own pasts much, but didn't let Tosh see as much action as she had in the twenty-first century. She knew it was because of her sex and her race, even though Jack tried to tell her they just valued her brain to highly to let her out in the field.

Jack didn't tell her where they were going, or rather, he told her where, but not why, and at first, she thought she was merely going to consult on some project at another branch, as she was sometimes asked to. She didn't think anything of the long flights across Europe and Asia until Jack rented a car and drove her out of Tokyo, away from Rayner-Torchwood Japan and deep into the countryside. Tosh, who had been dozing against the car window after the ordeal of the airport, woke to a mountainside view whipping past.

Tosh scrubbed her face and said, "Jack? This isn't--business. Is it?"

"No," Jack said. He glanced at her, then back to the road. "I know you've been tempted, I know you've requisitioned information on your family. It's safer if you do it with me." Which Tosh knew; he'd laid down every rule of time travel he could think of, when they realized they weren't going home except by the long route, and rule number one was the buddy system: stay together, both for the practicalities of the period, and because paradox was less likely to strike them both down at once.

"I wasn't going to," Tosh protested, straightening in her seat. "I wouldn't have."

"Then you're stronger than me," Jack said. "There are people I haven't been able to resist the temptation to look in on. It's hard to know that someone you--care about--is right here, and not at least go see them."

"But the danger," Tosh said. "Jack, I really wasn't--" But she was speaking in might-have-beens already; this close, she knew she wouldn't turn back, either.

"If emotion is weakness, _be weak_," Jack told her fiercely. "It keeps us human, Tosh, and of everything we are, we can least afford to lose our humanity."

And Tosh might have thought that their lives, or their existences, were more important than their humanity, and maybe it was only because Jack wasn't at risk to lose his life that he clung to humanity above survival, but it silenced her, his assertion. She had no wish to become hard to survive, and if there was another way, a way to bear up through the loneliness instead of closing oneself off--Jack was not the most open person in the world, private about unexpected things after being appalling public in regards to others, but neither was he the coldest person in the world. Not a paragon, nor Platonic ideal: human. There were worse examples Tosh might follow.

So they drove, past farms terraced into cliffsides, up narrow, winding roads. They finally stopped at a Buddhist shrine, which Jack told the locals in surprisingly fluent Japanese that they had come to see; a shrine which was more or less the center of the tiny village where Tosh's mother had grown up.

Was growing up, at this very moment.

Because Tosh's mother, running past to chase after a frog in the grass, was eight years old.

Tosh sat down with a thump on the shrine steps and put her hands over her mouth, afraid to move.

Jack patted her shoulder and walked past into the shrine; she heard him, distantly, pay some sort of respects to Buddha, or at least to the sensibilities of the pious. He came back out after a while, chatted up some pretty girl, followed her off somewhere, came back eventually with dinner: two bowls of rice, and chopsticks, and green tea. Tosh sipped the tea and ate the rice dutifully, without quite paying attention to it, and Jack, for once quiet, sat beside her and watched as she watched.

She saw her grandfather coming up the road with a cart, her grandfather, who she might someday see again as herself, if she lived long enough, and if she could bring herself to go to his birthday party older than he. She saw her grandmother, who she had never met, who had died before she was born. And she saw her mother, most of all she saw her mother, running hither and yon after butterflies and field mice, waving sticks like a tiny samurai; her mother, who she would never see living again; her mother, who had died of leukemia when Tosh was twenty-two.

When the sun went low and the fireflies danced through the grass, Tosh's mother was called home, and Jack stood up and held out his hand to Tosh, to take her home as well, as near a home as they had.

"We can do this again sometime," Jack offered quietly, when they were safely on the road again.

"No," Tosh said, because her heart was breaking. "No, let's don't."

Jack gave her a worried look. "Was it--was it okay?" he asked.

"Okay is not a big enough word," Tosh said. "It was wonderful. It was once in a lifetime. All right?"

"All right," said Jack, though he was clearly puzzled. Jack loved easily, and often, and didn't seem to unlove, ever: there must be a thousand Estelles he carried in his heart by now, Tosh thought, a thousand weaknesses he let himself wistfully indulge. Was it less painful for him? Or had he found some way to embrace that pain, sweeten the bitterness?

It wasn't something Tosh knew how to do, and she didn't think she could do this again, not knowing. Driving away from that village, Tosh felt as if she were losing her mother all over again.

**Author's Note:**

> Also archived on dreamwidth: <http://jmtorres.dreamwidth.org/1049318.html>


End file.
